The Opposite House

13 the hour of lead

I offer up Saturday night for a vigil. I flip through travel brochures. The purple UV lamps hurt my eyes. According to the brochures, Habana Vieja is old and beautiful and majestically crumbling, and Miramar has great beaches. Everything is very picturesquely blue and or a very surly brown, and set on a slant that sands down the sky’s edges. Cubans are, apparently, very friendly if they feel their gestures are reciprocated. Do I count, am I like that too? I thought everybody was like that.

I try to balance my saints’ medals on my forehead as if they are tokens that I can swap for something overhead, and I wait for Sunday morning Mass. I think, No, it is not true that Mami would try to inject me with visions. Not like that, not when I was so small. It is hard to know. I do know that Chabella loves me because she can look inside me against my will, and it seems people can only do that if they love you. But Chabella is from a different country to me; she is wound around and around with her Brigitte and my Bisabuela Carmen. I’ve had Mork and Mindy and The Cosby Show. I’ve had gaps between the things I see and the things I know, the dilemma of getting a comb through my hair on mornings when my personal hysteric makes my arms droop and refuse to work.

I stare at the Orishas from the distance Peckham affords me, but Chabella grew up in a small white house in Querejeta, just off a ring road, where trees are sparse and the traffic makes humidity fly in low circles. From her window she could see the Hotel Nacional waving its flag to welcome small crowds of hatted, suited, feathered, colourful Americans. From the first, she swears that all she ever wanted was to be gone from there.

There is one dog-eared photograph of Chabella at ten; we have never resembled each other physically, she and I. Light clusters in Chabella’s huge irises, and she is sitting on the marble steps inside her house, her posture perfect, her hands clasped, her hair combed up high and tied with a ribbon. She is smiling the way a china doll smiles, and to me that means she is not happy. China dolls, their cheeks flushed vicious, always look as if they have been threatened with dismemberment and posed, their limbs arranged. They would take life if they could. A few days after that picture was taken, Chabella tried to run away from home for the seventh time, and that day her father, Damason

(‘Your abuelo, God rest his soul,’ Chabella stares at me until I cross myself)

lost his patience with her and beat her. But escape wasn’t meant as a personal insult to Abuelo Damason.

Chabella was the youngest of his four children, and closer to her father than to Laline, her lawyer mother, who disappeared beneath portfolios and was preoccupied with women’s rights. Chabella and Abuelo Damason spent afternoons in his studio fascinated by feet, the whorls of taut skin. They stomped in vats of paint before dancing across vast sheets of expensive paper. He danced alone, then she danced alone, then they both danced together. They wanted to see whether the idea of dancing was contained in the feet, or, if not, what feet really meant. The tracks they made were linked, ungainly shapes, ridiculous, bright and strong, like the first images of their kind.

Abuelo Damason also had a lot of women back then. Sometimes Laline let her smooth veneer chip, and at night she would scream at Chabella’s father that he’d better stop making a fool of her with his girlfriends. They were ‘the kind of women who cluster around when a black Cuban becomes successful — all kinds,’ Mami said. Women who hated her, smiled at her, gave her sweets, and stole the hair from her combs so that they could have roots people work spells to make Chabella leave hold of her father’s heart. Chabella’s first real memory was of falling off the swing in the house’s back garden and cutting her knee, and then crying because her father wasn’t there. My pretty, light-skinned Tia Dayame, the next sister up from Mami, was combing her hair in front of the sitting-room mirror — when she saw the wound she simply shrugged and said, ‘Good.’

Maria, the family’s maid, cleaned Chabella’s knee with something special, and told her that she’d better be more careful. ‘If you leave your blood on the earth, it gets hungry for more,’ Maria told her, and then when six-year-old Chabella trembled, she reassured her by saying that there were at least three spiritual protectors observing her; one of them was an ancestor, another one was an Orisha. Maria told Mami that she was lucky. In those circumstances, it was true.

I grow so tired that my head droops and my mouth opens and I begin to think that I am my Chabella and that I am the woman who was singing the song that made the garden in Vedado so wild. St Bernadette and Jeanne d’Arc fall heavily into my lap and I try to make merciful Mary, the Mother of God, appear to me through the strength of my own heart.

I don’t want anything from her. I just want to know that I am the one that brought her.

My neck aches, and lines run straight up from that pain to my temples. Another line makes a trampoline from my stomach to a place above my head.

The pages of the brochures feel like money to me, brittle, symbolic — if I tear a page even slightly, I will not be able to go. Outside on the street, people are drunkenly cock-crowing. They sound close. I keep expecting to see faces imprinted on the window. Aaron tells me I need to rest, and he tries to make me lie down with him. When I won’t, he says, ‘OK wait, I’m just going to get my Jung, then I’ll be right back. I’ll stay up with you.’

He’s lucky that he didn’t promise; he doesn’t come back. I know he’s spread out over the bedcovers, staring, sleeping, with The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious beside his lax hand. The leak has grown louder, but he is able to sleep through it.

Sophie calls and softly asks me if I know when I’ll be able to sing again. I tell her I’m not sure, and that it’s fine if they want to find someone else until I’m ready. She doesn’t argue. When I put the phone down I walk back to the sofa slowly, tracking liquid with my fingers; warm, gelatinous arrows of blood are running down my thigh. But my period shouldn’t come. There is no reason for my period to come when I am pregnant. I am bloating, my stomach is touching my lap like sacking, and there is a smell that maybe Chabella would recognise. It is a bad, natural smell; logical, like rotting.

Amy’s dress is a plum divided; the deep-red taffeta skirts are the leathered skins, and the gleaming bodice is a layered tapestry of rich fruit flesh. The dress suits her completely, despite — or because of — the belt she’s slung at hip level, heavy with multicoloured scraps of silk. With every step she takes, a billow of her honey scent rises. Outside the day is chill and gloomy; cold sits still on the ground and in the air and sticks frosted leaves to the earth.

Amy wants Aya to know:

that she had thought she had settled for being just Amy,

that if it wasn’t for. .

(she rubs at a bruise, at her bandaged arm)

she wouldn’t know that this was a lie.

Tayo leans over the bathroom sink, fingers curled around his torso, incubating agony. He spits out a string of needles; the pain is irregular, but larger than his mind. Afterwards, he rinses out his mouth to lose the metal tang and mumbles in the bath, knees drawn to his chest. Water slams his curls flat against his head.

Another time he plugged up the sink and ran the tap until it overflowed. Then he lowered his face into the water — first just grazing it, a dip as if he were simply rinsing. Then, after a moment of shallow breathing, he dived for full, jerky immersion, clamping one hand onto the back of his head, fighting. As he drowned, Aya felt the water scuff her lungs. But before she could go to him he had already lost against himself. He surfaced, coughing liquid, to lay his head down on the side of the basin as the water dripped onto his bare feet.